2007-11-30 Friday

3rd Quarter Dice.com Job Market report for Seattle. As far as I can tell - Seattle looks like the market is still on a healthy trend. You can also see reports for other
local markets

No More Self-Organizing Teams? An interesting discussion. I think the appropriateness and degress of the Agile / Scrum principles adopted for a given project depend on the complexities of the organizational dynamics that may be in play. In some of my drect experiences, certain large-scale projects, that have fixed-price bid dynamics in play, often with multiple clients working in partnershp to spread the cost of the effort, and multiple vendors - all parties working with different priorities and agendas make the soup very spicey - and difficult to achieve success with the hoped-for-altruistic principle that the self-organizing team will do what is right for the project. Just my $0.02

I recently came across the XWiki project.

"XWiki is an open source wiki written in Java and released under the LGPL license"

"XWiki is a second generation wiki (a.k.a an application wiki), ideally suited for developing collaborative web applications."

2007-11-27 Tuesday

Yahoo sees outages on heavy online shopping day

Google expands into alternative energy

2007-11-23 Friday

Cusp - An Eclipse plug-in for Lisp.

RuleBurst Acquires U.S. Business Rules Technology Vendor Haley Systems

The 7 Highly Effective Habits of Successful Freelancers

The Open Source Web Design Toolbox: 100 Web Design Template Sources, Tools and Resources

70+ JavaScript Resources for Every Web Developer

I installed the IONA Fuse 5.0 Message Broker this last week at a client site (based on an implementation of the Apache ActiveMQ) - and will be evaluating it for use within the SOA / ESB infrastructure that we are designing.

The client has expressed an interest in deploying a Single-Sign-On (SSO) capability - and we are looking at several possible technical solutions. One that I'm keen to investigate further: JBoss Federated SSO .

Next week I will install the Drools business rule management system (BRMS). Download Drools 4.0.3here

For an interesting example of Drools, see Dr. Gernot Starke's blog post, The Golfer Riddle. Drool developers blog

netzoid.com - Scalable, Reliable, and Secure RESTful HTTP

I came across the IBM Research Ponder web site tonight. That's an interesting way to expand one's problem solving skills.

As a consultant that travels frequently on client engagements, this looks like an excellent stocking stuffer for the Technophiles in your life: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 TV Tuner Stick/Personal Video Recorder



Another option...



or,

2007-11-21 Wednesday

What's New in Visual Studio 2008?

Speed up Visual Studio 2005

Optimize the launch of the Visual Studio 2005

You Want a 10,000 RPM Boot Drive...

Western Digital, SATA Hard Drives, 150 GB, 1.5 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 10,000 RPM

2007-11-17 Saturday

FIPS and SSL - Bad Mojo

I run several tools to help secure my computer systems - and frequently run updates for the latest releases for my firewall, antivirus, and operating system patches. But recently I wanted to step up my security game a bit - and began implementing a number of additional security measures.

There are several good sources on the web for additional tips and tricks to enhance the security of your computer - and as I worked through various recommendations, I decided to turn-on the Windows XP FIPS cryptographic option for critical information stored in certain file folders that I selected for encryption.

Big Mistake

Since I had downloaded the latest updates for my internet security software and Microsoft Windows XP, there were a significant number of variables in flight. When the HTTPS connection to a number of critical financial web sites stopped working, I began the laborous process of root-cause analysis (while other HTTPS connections did appear to continue working).

I had created a Restore Point before beginning this adventure, but I always prefer to learn from problems - not just "get it to work".

After a few hours of investtigation, and acquiring some new computer forensic skills, I found out that the Microsoft FIPS cryptographic option is not compatible with SSL.

Bad Microsoft.

2007-11-12 Monday

Google has released Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project

This is a bit dated (Sept. 27, 2006), but has some interesting information: Prototype the most popular Ajax framework across Java, .NET, & Rails communities - 2006 Survey Results

I love being in High-Tech. I love being part of the energy that is a startup. I took a detour early in my career - and was almost seduced into the "golden handcuffs" that large corporations offer...

I discovered my true passion when I was still in the U.S. Army, living in a basement apartment in Bamberg Germany in 1983-1984 - sitting at the kitchen table late into the night - teaching myself to program 6502 Assembler and Basic. Later, working as a programmer for a small bank in the mid-South, developing high-performance real-time transaction systems that connected to the national ATM networks - I still enjoyed "tinkering" when I went home - developing code - stretching my abilities.

I've overloaded my stress capacitors on a few projects over the years...a $100M+ project to redesign their call center infrastructure [for a major telecom company], a $100M+ project to redesign a Customer Account Support System [for a major Japanese automotive company] , the $100M+ VC funded Paul Allen Mercata.com startup venture, leading the successful development and launch of another dot.com start-up as their CTO in 2001...and came out the other end of the whole dot.com crash as a burned out husk of a man. In the years since, I have searched for ways to avoid burn-out - and to find sustainable ways of earning a living doing what I love: leading software development teams to produce exceptional solutions.

In 2004, while sailing in the Sea of Cortez aboard my magic carpet (S/V Renaissance) - taking a sabbatical to recharge my internal batteries - I found that passion again - as I reworked a code-generating framework that has been a pet project of mine for almost 8 years. This story reminded me of that passion - and stirred those embers again:

seattlepi.com: John Cook's blog: Ready, set develop: How to create a six hour startup. - Startup Weekend site

2007-11-11 Sunday

The Executive Development Program, offered through the Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, has an interesting program that I would like to explore sometime in the future.


Flyspray 0.9.9.3

I have just run into an unusual installation error message. I've been able to install Flyspray 0.9.9.3 under Windows - but when I tried to install on a hosted Linux site (FreeBSD 4.11?), I got the error message: "SQL file required for importing structure and data is missing".

It turns out that the hosted Linux server doesn't allow a directory name such as \0.9.9.2

I copied the files out of the \setup\upgrade\0.9.9.2\ to \setup\upgrade\ and was able to proceed with the install.

See the following code from setup\index.php(lines 968-981)


function PopulateDb($data)
{
// Check available upgrade scripts, use the script of very latest version
$folders = glob_compat(BASEDIR . '/upgrade/[0-9]*');
usort($folders, 'version_compare'); // start with lowest version
$folders = array_reverse($folders); // start with highest version
$sql_file = APPLICATION_PATH . '/setup/upgrade/' . reset($folders) . '/flyspray-install.xml';

// Check if the install/upgrade file exists
if (!is_readable($sql_file)) {

$_SESSION['page_message'][] = 'SQL file required for importing structure and data is missing.';
return false;
}


This weekend I received a book from a publisher to review. I'll be publishing my review within the next 2-3 weeks. The book is "Java EE 5 Development using Glassfish Application Server", by David R. Heffelfinger (PACKT Publishing). Since I'm currently working with Glassfish for a client engagement, this will be a very timely opportunity to review this new book.

2007-11-03 Saturday

University of London - Artificial Intelligenc, course material

2007-11-02 Friday

Microsoft takes proprietary shortcut to SOA

OOP: Thinking beyond verb/noun metaphor to yield a better design

JSLoader